Environmental theatre is a style of performance where the whole space becomes the stage — and the audience is placed inside the world of the play rather than watching it from a separate “front.” [more]

Musicals can do a bunch of things more easily than straight plays — not because they’re “higher art,” but because they have extra gears: music, rhythm and often choreography. But before we get started, what are your favorite musicals, and why? [more]

Realism — life-as-lived, subtext, ordinary rooms. Spot it: overlapping dialogue, small stakes that add up, behavior > speeches. [more]

A tragedy asks a moral or human question that cannot be answered cleanly. Examples: What does it cost to be right? What must be destroyed for love to survive? When is faith indistinguishable from delusion? If the question has an easy answer, it won’t sustain tragedy. [more]

Story Theatre sits somewhere between oral storytelling, ensemble theatre and playwriting. You’re not “writing scenes” in the traditional way so much as composing an event where narration and enactment constantly trade places. [more]

Theatre genres overlap and evolve, but they’re usually grouped by tone, structure, purpose and relationship to reality. For example, tragedy is serious drama in which characters confront irreversible consequences. (more)

History is the circumstance, not the subject.  A strong historical play isn’t about an era.  It’s about the people trapped inside it.  The past supplies constraints: laws, beliefs, class, danger and the drama comes from characters pushing against those limits.  If the story still works when summarized without dates, you’re on the right track. (more)